Showing posts with label Social Networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Networking. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Twitter



Atlast I have joined twitter. I have the habit of reading Singer Chinmayi's blog(though she has many other faces, I would like to refer her so!), once in a while. She had a side widget saying, "Follow me on twitter"!

My friend Surya had been saying that Twitter was an innovative concept and was different from the normal websites, couple of months back. I used to wonder about his statement. I have read in newspapers that Twitter was a social networking site. Already we have n number of social networking sites (I favour Orkut). Then whats so special about Twitter. Surya always speaks so high of mozilla, linux, open source etc., and thrashes windows. I have always believed that except for a few most of the people confuse between open source and freeware. It is strictly my view(not to be generalized). To be honest, I didn't bother about the Twitter mainly because Surya spoke so high of it! Thought it must be one of those open source projects which he admires just because it is open source :-P. But it was not to be so!

Anyway, today I was pretty free, with no other job except to relax, which I usually do after the exams!

I followed the link to Twitter from Chinmayi's blog, just like the poor Alice following the white rabbit. I found that there were few messages that Chinmayi had typed in Twitter! They appeared to me like quick sms's that she had typed (Later, I found that those messages are called as tweets). I registered into twitter.

To know more about Twitter, I wikied about it. It's become my regular practice to search as "searchterm wiki" instead of "searchterm" in google.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service, itself, costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

The 140 character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging, and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services such as tinyurl, bit.ly and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.

So I have to agree with Surya that Twitter is a different social networking site! But, when I was skimming about Twitter in wikipeida, I found this statement, "The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework". Ruby in Rails is a open source technology, to which Surya is closely associated to! Afterall my conclusion about Surya proves to be right!